Alexandra Lange, and Mark Lamster

Lunch With The Critics: Third-Annual Year-End Awards

As they do everyyear, our fearless critics, Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster, gathered over lunch to bestow their annual design awards. Biased? Definitely. Parochial? Perhaps. Entertaining? Naturally. Despite a busy twelve months in which they communicated with the dead and published books (in paper and pixels!), they have nonetheless found time to put together the biggest, bestest, and most, well, brutal list in LWTC history. This year’s winners—and losers—follow.

THE 2012 LWTC YEAR-END AWARDS

Elevation Award: to Superstorm Sandy, for making climate change a part of every future discussion about building in coastal cities.

Flat Earth Award: To the wing-nuts and cynics who have used the UN's harmless and anodyne Agenda 21 as a bogeyman to block sensible planning initiatives.

The Mugatu/Derelicte Award for Non-Ironic Appropriation: To Gran Horizonte, the Venice Biennale installation that transformed a Caracas squatter tower into an arepa bar for jet-setting architourists.

Who’s Afraid of Rosettes? Award: to Gae Aulenti, RIP, for her radical postmodern conversion of the the Musee D’Orsay.

Fighting the Good Fight Award: To Charles Birnbaum and The Cultural Landscape Foundation, for their efforts to save M. Paul Friedberg's Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis (and other forgotten treasures).

Don Draper Is Not Impressed Award: to Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas (and their lesser-known partners) for failing at what every bright young American architect (and Bjarke Ingels) aces, the elevator pitch.

The Neiman Marcus Big Spender Award: to Kelcy Warren, who paid millions to name Dallas's new deck park after his ten-year-old son. Really.

But Where Will Design Types Register? Award: the recession and e-commerce claim Soho design pioneer Moss.Midlife Crisis Averted Award: To Pentagram, for the epic bacchanal that was its 40th anniversary party.

Cornering the Election Award: to Hoefler & Frere-Jones, as designers of both Obama's custom-made slab-serif version of Gotham, and Romney’s clearly less presidential Mercury.

Neglected Heroes Memorial Award: We lost John Johansen and Gerhard Kallmann this year, but their built legacy remains, for the moment. Let's keep it that way.

Last Modernist Award: to Oscar Niemeyer, dead at 104, who outlasted the century whose architecture he defined.